More Than Half of Public Hot Tub Spas Violate Safety Standards

July
1, 2004 -- More than half of the public hot tub spas in the U.S. may be
unsafe, according to a new report from the CDC.

Researchers
found 57% of the more than 5,000 public hot
tub inspections across the U.S. had one or more safety violations. Spas
located at campgrounds and hotels or motels were the biggest offenders.

Eleven
percent of the violations were severe enough to
result in the immediate closure of the facility, pending correction of
the violation(s).

The
most common violation was poor water quality.

Researchers
say the findings show that more rigorous
safety inspections and improved training of spa operators are needed to
reduce the threat to public health posed by public hot tubs.

The high temperature of the water in
spas depletes the disinfectant and makes them an ideal environment for
bacteria, such as Legionella,
and other diseases. During 1999-2000, a total of 13 outbreaks of
infectious disease, affecting 183 people, were attributed to public and
private spa use.

Comment: My ex-father-in-law
(father-ex-in-law? father-in-ex-law?)
contracted Legionnaire's Disease, traced back to a wooden hot
tub. That was in the early eighties. He spent over a week
in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics. Fortunately, the
causative agent had been identified by the CDC in 1977, after a long
and highly-publicized effort by public health officials. There
had been an outbreak of a mysterious type of pneumonia at an American
Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976, with 34 fatalities.

Legionnaire's Disease is caused by a genus of
bacteria named Legionella.
There are different species, some more dangerous than others. L. pneumophila is the
species that most commonly causes illness in humans. Legionella
are gram-negative rods that can be detected using a direct fluorescent
antibody test. Symptoms occur within 2-10 days, and include
cough, shortness of breath, high fever (up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit),
gastrointestinal symptoms, and muscle pain. The disease is
treated with macrolide or fluoroquinolone antibiotics. The
mortality rate is reported variously as 15-25%. The real
mortality rate is unknown, though, because it is thought that many or
the milder cases go unreported.

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.